President Barack Obama’s opponents have accused him for years of waging a war on coal.

On Tuesday, he sounded the cannons.

The president announced a broad climate change package that lays out his vision for a low-carbon U.S. future — and made it clear that coal will have a diminished place in it.

Obama’s plan goes after coal on multiple fronts. It orders EPA to write long-expected regulations setting greenhouse gas limits that would undoubtedly fall heavily on coal-fired power plants. The plan aims to discourage the construction of coal plants overseas, which could hurt exports, and calls on owners of coal-burning operations to switch to natural gas.

Altogether, the results could deal a death blow to the American coal industry. The proposed EPA rules follow stringent air toxics regulations that the agency has already issued, which are a contributing factor in many older coal plants shutting down rather than upgrading by the 2015 deadline.

The plan offers some nods in coal’s direction by calling for further work on developing “clean coal” technologies, which would enable coal plants to capture and store or use their carbon pollution. But for now, building a coal plant that captures its carbon is extremely expensive, and for many it is simply not worth it in light of low natural gas prices. And not all areas are geographically suited to storing carbon underground.

Coal-friendly lawmakers roared at what the plan means for their constituents, saying coal not only provides jobs but keeps electricity prices low.

“Sadly, this recent announcement spells trouble for a vital industry in West Virginia that has already been hard-hit by this administration,” Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said Tuesday.

Obama’s climate agenda “makes clear that with his final election behind him, [Obama] is free to abandon his campaign promise to the nation of an ‘all of the above’ approach to meet our energy needs,” said House Science environment subcommittee Chairman Chris Stewart (R-Utah).

But environmentalists said Obama is right to shun what they see as a dirty fuel that is already falling behind in the marketplace.

The president is saying the country is “not putting money or support behind something … that is not only bad for the planet but increasingly” a poor business decision, said Bruce Nilles, a senior campaign director for Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign.

“The three main planks of President Obama’s plan — controlling emissions from coal plants, increasing energy efficiency, and increased development of renewable energy sources — remove the series of false choices that Big Oil and Big Coal have worked so hard to perpetuate,” said Maggie Fox, CEO of Climate Reality, a group founded and chaired by Al Gore.

Gore himself said the speech was “by far the best address on climate by any president ever.”

Even before the speech, one member of a White House science advisory panel provoked outrage on and off Capitol Hill by telling The New York Times that “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” The remarks by the panel member, Harvard professor Daniel Schrag, prompted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to warn on the Senate floor Tuesday that “declaring a war on coal is tantamount to declaring a war on jobs.”

Beyond that, the White House is clearly looking to make some big agreements at an upcoming 2015 international climate conference. “We will be seeking an agreement that is ambitious, inclusive and flexible. It needs to be ambitious to meet the scale of the challenge facing us. It needs to be inclusive because there is no way to meet that challenge unless all countries step up and play their part,” Obama’s plan says.

Tuesday was a “terrific day building on a lot of hard work over the last decade to stop the construction of new coal,” Nilles said. “We have an aging coal fleet… and the president’s putting his shoulder to the wheel to make this happen,” he said.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) played both sides of the coin, applauding Obama’s decision to take on climate change but charging that some of his proposals “amplify the administration’s continuing war on coal and coal-fired power” with “regulations that do nothing more than choke off good-paying American jobs.”

“Instead of taking this route, we need to find a path forward for the coal industry and coal-fired power by encouraging continued investments in new and existing technologies to further reduce emissions through clean coal technology projects including commercially scalable carbon capture and sequestration,” Heitkamp said.

One industry leader agreed.

“This is going to be a legacy issue for the President, a legacy of higher energy costs, lost jobs, and a shattered economy,” said Mike Duncan, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The coal industry has already invested more than $100 billion to clean up coal, Duncan said, and plans to double that over the next 15 years.

But that won’t be enough, Duncan said. “If the Obama administration fails to recognize the environmental progress the industry has made and continues to adopt more regulations, coal power could cease to exist, which would be devastating for our economy,” he said.

Coal’s future “depends on the reaction of the coal industry,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

More research and development into carbon capture technology could extend the life of the fossil fuel, but “that technology is expensive,” Karpinski said, adding: “Let’s face it — the future is likely to be a future that is rich in renewable energy.”

Though Obama didn’t say so in his plans, some greens hope his willingness to lean hard on coal power and consider the greenhouse gas impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline will result in a willingness to stop new coal exports.

The president’s call to stop public financing of coal power plants overseas “is signaling” that his intentions to reduce fossil fuel use here and abroad aren’t just about oil, some activists said.

“I think we’re getting all the right signals,” said the National Wildlife Federation’s Kassie Rohrbach, who said she is “optimistic that this administration would apply the same principle” to coal exports.

The Sierra Club’s Nilles also saw hope for the anti-coal campaign in Obama’s call for considering the climate impacts of building Keystone.

“If you extend that to coal infrastructure, you’d be hard pressed to say” it’s the right choice to build new coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest, he said. And when it comes to federally leased coal-mining lands, it raises the question, “is it wise for the U.S. to be selling its coal?” Nilles said.

As demand for coal at home has shrunk, the U.S. coal industry has been increasingly shifting its focus to exporting coal, particularly to China.

But Obama’s new agenda puts a major crimp in those plans.

The coal industry could take another big hit as a byproduct of efforts to encourage fuel switching from coal to natural gas, with the underlying force of expanding America’s natural gas exports. And the president says the government won’t support or fund new coal-fired power internationally, unless the plants use costly carbon-capture technology.

“America must help forge a truly global solution to this global challenge by galvanizing international action to significantly reduce emissions (particularly among the major emitting countries), prepare for climate impacts, and drive progress through the international negotiations,” Obama’s climate plan says.

Many opponents of the president’s plans are skeptical that he’ll get other major countries to go along, although China is piloting a cap and trade program.

“If we cannot get China to agree to hand over one American fugitive, the prospects for China following the president’s climate lead are dim,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). “Leaders in Beijing will gladly welcome America’s job creators, and America’s coal with open arms.”